Lectures - The Bible As Seen through Reformation Lenses

How was the Bible viewed and used before the invention of the printing press changed history? Five billion copies of the Bible have been printed, making it the best-selling and most influential book of all time. Today the Bible is seen as the backbone of Christian practice. Christians own Bibles and often read and study the text in their own language. And for Protestants, the Bible is the “sole source” of religious authority. But this wasn’t always the case. How did Christians use and view the Bible before the invention of the printing press, when it was read primarily by clerics in languages like Latin that only the educated knew? We’ll explore how the changes of modernity and how Protestant lenses have distorted the way Christians viewed scripture in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.